I groaned. I should call her. Tell her I was fine and not to come over. We could talk next week. But I didn’t even feel like speaking to her answering machine, much less to her. I’d deal with her later.
My flight was late and I tried to doze sitting up in the chair, but all I could think about was my conversation with Grady.
She was an awesome girl.
Every time I remembered him saying that about Lisa, I smiled. Suddenly, I felt as though I knew her. Hearing about her from my parents, or more recently from Jeannie and Caterina, had never had that impact on me. But now I knew she was awesome. Grady hadn’t based that assessment on her musical ability. He hadn’t even known about that. He’d based it on the person she was, separate from her violin. That was the person I wanted desperately to find.
44.
Jeannie didn’t even knock before walking in the front door early that evening. After my blowup the other day, I would have thought she’d have the sense to at least knock before barging in, but no. I was sitting barefoot on the living room floor surrounded by piles of paid bills and statements and tax documents pulled from the cabinets. I’d already filled two big black trash bags with paper I’d have to shred later, but I didn’t want to take the time to do it now. If there was something—anything—related to Lisa in those cabinets, I wanted to find it. So far, I wasn’t having much luck. Most of the documents were ancient utility bills and medical records I saw no point in keeping.
“Well!” Jeannie stood in the middle of the room, smiling. “I see you’re finally making some real progress.”
I glanced up at her, but said nothing. She was dressed in white slacks and a navy blue blazer with a gold TOP REALTOR pin on the lapel.
“Maybe you just needed a little space from Christine and me,” she added.
“You’re right.” I shoved another fistful of paper into one of the trash bags. “I needed some time on my own, that’s all.”
“I understand. Oh! Look at this!” She’d spotted the photographs I’d taken with me to San Diego where they now lay on the coffee table. She picked up the picture of Lisa standing back-to-back with Matty, locks of their hair tangled together. “Is this the most darling photo or what?” she asked.
“It really is.” I had to agree.
“I haven’t seen this picture in a long time,” she said. “They look like Siamese twins here, don’t they? That’s what they were like. You hardly ever saw one without the other.” The pink of the setting sun poured through the window and across Jeannie’s smile. “She’s wearing the necklace I gave her,” she said.
I’d been about to toss another stack of papers into the trash bag, but lowered my hand to the floor.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“This necklace.” Jeannie tapped the picture with her fingertip. “I gave it to her. It’s jade. Lisa always wore it, and that touched me so much. It had Chinese symbols carved on the front and back. They meant ‘long life’ and ‘joy,’ or something like that.”
I set down the stack of papers and leaned back on my hands. “I was told that one of her violin teachers gave her that pendant,” I said.
“Told by whom?” Jeannie frowned.
“I don’t remember,” I said. I was certain that’s what Caterina had said—that the teacher who had “ruined” Lisa’s playing had given the pendant to her. Of course, maybe Lisa had lied to Caterina. I knew for a fact that my sister was not the most honest person.
“What teacher?” Jeannie asked. “Steven Davis? Caterina Thoreau?”
“The one in between them,” I said. “I heard—or maybe I read somewhere—that Lisa went away to study with another teacher and that’s the one who gave her the necklace.”
Jeannie stared at me and I couldn’t read her expression. “Well.” She looked flustered. “Maybe I have it mixed up with another necklace.” She quickly set the photograph back on the coffee table.
“Do you know who it was?” I asked. “The teacher Lisa went away to study with?”
“I really don’t recall very much about those days,” she said. “It was so long ago. Christine had taken off with a bunch of her friends to live overseas, and I was beside myself worrying about her.” She looked pointedly at her watch. “And now I’ve got to run. I just wanted to stop in to be sure you’re doing okay. I’m thrilled to see you’re making progress and I know Christine will be happy to hear it.”
She left without saying good-bye. If it had been anyone else, I would have thought her behavior in the last few minutes was very strange, but given that it was Jeannie, it seemed in keeping with her character.
With a shrug, I went back to pulling paperwork from the cabinets, setting aside anything that looked important from the last three years, and tossing the rest. But as I worked, I wondered which story about the pendant was the truth. Did it really matter, though? I couldn’t imagine why.
* * *
I’d nearly reached the last cabinet, the one closest to the wall of vinyl records, by eight o’clock. I had five garbage bags full to overflowing in the middle of the living room. I’d found absolutely nothing to give me a clue to my sister’s whereabouts, but I had a sense of accomplishment at finally getting this task off my list of things to do.
I had to move the big upholstered armchair aside to get into that last cabinet, and as soon as I opened the door, I knew this one was different. There were actual file storage boxes inside, three of them, not a loose paper to be seen, and I was instantly filled with sadness. These must have been my mother’s files. On the front of the first one, she’d written the word Appliances in her distinctive handwriting. On the second box, Kids. On the third, Marriage License, Insurance, Misc.
I pulled out the Kids box and set it on the floor. I felt the tiniest flash of fear at the possibility of finding adoption papers inside, but I no longer believed a word out of Verniece’s mouth. I didn’t know what her motivation had been to feed me tales. Maybe it had been part of her and Tom’s diabolical plan to wear me down.
I lifted the lid and saw that the box was crammed full of file folders. Again, seeing my mother’s neat writing on the tabs of each folder made my heart contract. I tugged out the file containing our old report cards. Danny’s and mine were the usual computerized cards, but my sister’s were handwritten forms that must have been used in homeschooling. I’d been a model student, according to my elementary school teachers’ comments. Danny, not so much, and I felt terrible reading about his difficult childhood, especially from my perspective now as a school counselor and knowing how he’d been lied to—manipulated, really—by our parents. There are all sorts of abuse, he’d told me.
I read the comments from his teachers. “Danny wants to be good, but he lacks self-control, leading to fights with other students and misbehavior in class.” I read only two years of his report cards before shoving them back into the box. It was too painful to think of how he must have felt, knowing deep in his heart that his sister had killed someone but being told he was “misremembering.”
In the box was a thick white folder devoted to Lisa. Awards she’d won. Certificates of Achievement. I was reading through that file when I noticed the heading at the top of the next folder: Birth Certificates. I remembered reading that Internet article that suggested looking at your birth certificate to figure out if you were adopted. That felt like months ago now rather than a couple of weeks. Check your place of birth, the article had suggested. I reached into the folder and pulled out our three certificates. Lisa and Danny both had been born in Mount Vernon Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, but my birth certificate told a different story. “Place of Birth: Mission Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina.” I stared at it in confusion for a moment before remembering the first time I’d seen the certificate. I must have been about ten years old and I remembered asking my mother why I’d been born in Asheville. Daddy and I were visiting Mrs. Lyons in Asheville when you were born, she’d told me. That had made perfectly good sense to me at the time, but suddenly I thought it s
trange. I was eight and a half pounds when I was born. I couldn’t have been very early. My parents had lived in northern Virginia then. Would they have traveled six or seven hours from home so close to my mother’s due date?
They found a baby girl being put up for adoption here in North Carolina, Verniece had said.
A feeling of horror began to wash over me. I remembered meeting Christine for the first time. The way she’d gripped my hands. The way she’d proclaimed, You’re so pretty, isn’t she, Mom?
“Please, no,” I said out loud. I thought of Christine’s wavy dark hair, so much like my own.
I stared at my birth certificate awhile longer, looking at my parents’ names. I desperately wanted them to be my biological parents! I had to know. I had to. I reached for my phone.
45.
Jeannie was in the middle of writing up an offer for a house buyer when I called her, but she must have caught the quaking of my voice because she said she’d be over the second she was finished. I spent the next hour shredding my father’s dated utility bills and medical records. It was blessedly mindless work and slow going, and I’d only made it through one of the trash bags by the time Jeannie pulled into the driveway.
I opened the door and walked barefoot onto the porch, watching her as she got out of her car and hurried up the sidewalk, her white blouse neon bright in the darkness.
“What’s going on?” she asked, shading her eyes against the porch light with her hand. “You sounded upset on the phone.”
Wordlessly, I sat down on the top step and she climbed up to sit next to me. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I found a copy of my birth certificate.” I looked at her squarely. “Tell me the truth, Jeannie. Is Christine my mother? Are you my grandmother?”
Her eyes flew open. “No!” she said. “Of course not! Why on earth would you think that?”
“Don’t lie to me!” I snapped. “I can’t handle any more … lies and deception.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was born in Asheville,” I said. “I’d forgotten that, but I just found a copy of my birth certificate. Verniece said my parents found a baby to adopt in North Carolina. How do you explain my being born in Asheville when my family lived in Virginia?”
Jeannie looked into my dark front yard, not speaking right away. “Christine left home when she was seventeen,” she said finally. “She was living in Amsterdam when you were born, most likely so stoned she didn’t know her own name. She’s only been clean a few years, now. That’s one reason why this estate sale work is so important to her. She wants to make a career out of it. She needs that.”
“Oh,” I said quietly, aware that Jeannie had revealed something painful to me. I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts, though, to pursue it. “Then why does it say Asheville on my birth certificate?” I asked. For a fleeting moment, I thought Jeannie herself might be my birth mother.
She looked toward the street again and let out a heavy, defeated sigh. “Lisa never went away to study the violin,” she said. “She was living with me in Asheville, waiting to have her baby.” She turned toward me, her face ghostly white in the porch light. “To have you.”
It took a moment for her words to sink in. I felt queasy, the porch spinning around me, and I gripped the edge of the step to make the world hold still. “Oh, no,” I whispered. I stood up, ignoring the dizziness as I walked blindly down the steps and onto the dark lawn. The grass felt strange and cool beneath my bare feet. I took a few steps toward the street, then turned to look at the house I’d grown up in. The living room windows glowed with a golden light, and the porch light illuminated the ornate trim and a patch of peeling yellow paint. All of it blurred in front of me. I’d led a counterfeit life inside those four walls.
Jeannie’s gaze was on me and she perched half on, half off the top step as though she might need to run to my side any moment to hold me up. She was saying something, but she may as well have been in the next town. No words could make it through the buzzing in my head.
I sank onto the lawn, only vaguely aware of Jeannie rushing down the steps toward me. How could my parents have kept this from me my entire life? I’d been lied to. Whispered about. They were never going to tell me the truth.
But then I thought of Lisa, who had never had the chance to live in this house. What fear and pain she must have endured. What shame and embarrassment. And her career … No wonder her playing had suffered. There was no mystery teacher. Only a mystery child. Me.
Jeannie had reached my side. I heard her hard breathing as she sat down next to me in her crisp Realtor suit and rested a hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”
I looked wordlessly at the sky. The stars and moon were nothing more than a fog of light and dark.
“No one ever wanted you to know,” she said softly.
I shut my eyes, holding still until I could find my voice. “What happened?” I asked finally, looking at her. “They sent her away when she was pregnant and told everyone she was studying with another teacher?”
“That’s exactly it,” she said. “Deb—your mother—called me in tears and asked if Lisa could live with me during her pregnancy. With her being so famous in music circles, Deb and Frank were worried about her getting a lot of negative attention and ruining her career. She was already four months along when she told your parents. At first she planned to put her baby up for adoption, but as she got closer to her due date, she realized she couldn’t do it. So your parents decided to adopt the baby—adopt you—when you were born.” She raised her hand to my cheek to brush away a strand of hair. Her touch felt tender. “Lisa stayed with me a couple of months after you were born so it wouldn’t seem so obvious to the rest of the world that the baby was hers. And they told Steven and everyone that she’d decided to study with someone else for that period of time.”
I was too stunned to say a word.
“You have to forgive your parents,” Jeannie said. “They’d always planned to tell you the truth when you were old enough to understand, but with everything that happened with Lisa—the charges against her and her suicide—they felt it was best for you never to know any of it.”
“So … you were the person who gave her the pendant.”
She nodded.
I thought of the photograph on the coffee table inside the house. Lisa and Matty. Like Siamese twins, Jeannie had said. “Was Matty my father?”
The reflection of the porch light bounced in her eyes as she nodded. “We always thought so, though Lisa adamantly denied it, so your parents never talked to him or his parents about it. Lisa said it was a boy she met at one of the music festivals she went to. The one in Rome. I suppose that’s possible, but Lisa and Matty were so inseparable, and when you were born with that full head of dark curly hair, we all just assumed. They were so young, her and Matty. They may have been … I don’t know, experimenting or whatever. She never told him, as far as I know. She talked to him on the phone a lot when she was with me, but I’d overhear her telling him about violin techniques she was learning, when the truth was, she barely picked up the violin while she was in Asheville. She was quite depressed.” Jeannie’s voice cracked. “I always wished I could have helped her,” she said. “Done more for her. She probably should have been on medication.”
“I need to get that picture,” I said, standing up. The muscles in my legs shivered as I walked toward the house. I climbed the porch steps and walked into the living room. It felt like days had passed since I’d been in that room, going through the cabinets. I picked up the photograph of Lisa and Matty from the coffee table. It suddenly seemed even more precious to me and I held it tenderly. When I brought it outside, Jeannie was sitting on the top porch step again, blotting her eyes with a tissue. I sat down next to her, holding the picture on my knees so that it caught the light. That curly mop of Matty’s hair seemed like a dead giveaway. “Do you know where he is?” I asked.
“Matty? I have no idea. He was still studying with S
teven Davis right up until Steven’s death, as far as I know.”
“His last name is Harrison, right?”
She nodded, then rested her hand on my knee. “Lisa was a good girl, Riley,” she said. “She became very dear to me while we lived together. I felt like I’d failed with Christine and I really wanted to help Lisa, and she was so easy to be with after dealing with my own difficult daughter. She helped around the house while I worked. I was an accountant for a group of doctors’ offices in Asheville. I had a dog and he got so attached to Lisa, he nearly ignored me, and he grieved for her when she left. So did I, actually.” She smiled. “I got to know her very well. Probably even better than your parents did, because she felt like she could be more open with me than with them. You’re a counselor. You know how that is sometimes.”
“But she didn’t tell you if it was Matty?”
“And I never pressed.” She changed position on the hard step. “That’s how I got her to talk to me,” she said. “By not pushing her. I loved her.” Her eyes clouded over again. “I was sad when she returned home. I missed her. She was such a dear soul.”
How could she leave me? I thought, feeling more alone than ever. She faked her suicide and left me and never looked back. How could I ever move past that fact? But I couldn’t say any of that to Jeannie. She still thought Lisa was dead.
“Were my parents angry with her?” I asked. “For getting pregnant, I mean?” With a jolt, I realized that my father had been my grandfather. My mother, my grandmother. Danny was actually my uncle. I hugged my arms across my chest, suddenly terribly sad. In the space of a few minutes, I’d lost the family I’d known. I’d lost my only brother.
“If they were angry, they didn’t let me see it. Once they accepted what was happening and made the decision to adopt Lisa’s baby, I think your mother was excited.”